O’SIDE MUSEUM DIRECTOR DRAWS PICTURE OF DOWNTOWN REBIRTH

Back in the mid-1980s, when I first started covering North County, one of the most important running stories was Escondido’s multimillion-dollar gamble to revive its downtown by investing in the arts.

The century-old city with a rural heritage plunged on a posh performing arts center — theaters, convention center and museum — in a bold effort to revive a downtown that had been put into a sleeper hold by the arrival of North County Fair.

Some 30 years later, the return on the hopeful bet is mixed, at best. The city can boast a lovely cultural campus, but if anything has been learned, it’s that a glittering Taj Mahal, especially one that requires major subsidies, does not a Carmel make.

The civic business plan was, in retrospect, too much about flashy upfront money and rich patrons and too little about focusing on the conditions in which arts and entertainment could flourish at the grass roots.

At least that’s what I take away from Daniel Foster, for the last year the executive director of the Oceanside Museum of Art.

Foster was most recently director of the Riverside Art Museum and head of an Inland Empire foundation supporting the arts.

During a recent TV interview on KOCT’s Journalist Roundtable, Foster framed his 26,000-square-foot museum as Oceanside’s “beacon of culture.”

But to Foster, art, public or private, is not just for art’s sake. It’s also for the economy’s sake. No museum is an island, separate from civic life.

In that respect, Foster sounds much like the early directors of Escondido’s arts center, who believed they were ushering in a downtown renaissance to recoup the city’s investment.

But there’s a huge difference.

OMA, located in a gorgeously expanded Irving Gill classic near City Hall, has for two decades been an organic, and universally beloved, part of the community, not a politically controversial and enormously costly white elephant gushing red ink. OMA’s slowly grown in stature, not shrunk.

In Foster’s first year, for example, museum memberships have risen from 1,000 to 1,350, he said. This year’s attendance is on course to increase 80 percent, thanks in large part to a popular Hubbell sculpture exhibit.

OMA’s success as a museum, however, will be measured both by performance metrics and its leadership in Oceanside’s downtown development, Foster suggested.

As OMA evolves into a regional attraction — “coming into maturity,” as Foster put it — the museum is stepping up as a player in shaping downtown’s future.

For the past three months, Foster has been leading a consortium of some 60 community leaders. Their goal is to “link arms” and agree on how downtown Oceanside can develop into a vibrant cultural arts hub.

Foster cites his own experience in Riverside as well as downtown rebirths in Pasadena and Santa Ana as proof of what can be done.